In mid-March, when the closures and travel restrictions in response to the spread of Covid-19 were announced, I was busy preparing for a lengthy ethnographic fieldwork in Istanbul, Turkey. Following on from my earlier research on aesthetic body modification and the formation of femininity in the Turkish middle class, I wanted to focus on the immense, if neglected, role of smell and perfuming in everyday beauty practices. The preliminary title of the project was "Olfactories of Beauty". The idea for my current research came to me when I heard the news from Turkey about the panic buying of cologne, which many now also use as a hand sanitiser. At the same time, in preparation for my fieldwork, I read anthropological and historical studies about the therapeutic, even medicinal, role of smell. As a result, the smells of beauty transformed into the smells of hygiene. This interview with Claudia Liebelt was conducted by Mihir Sharma and completed and edited by email in Berlin between 25 and 29 May 2020.